Regarding those mistakes made by science…

I know I shouldn’t use the conspiracy theory fallacy when talking about the pseudoscience-pushing science deniers, who are the bread and butter of topics for skeptics. But, when I keep observing the same ridiculous and insanely illogical arguments used in the same manner by all of the deniers, I begin to wonder if they don’t get together annually at the International Society of Pseudoscience meeting, usually held in Sedona, Arizona, ground zero of woo. They obviously share their stories, because we hear the same regurgitated stories in different contexts.

The antivaccinationists, creationists, anthropogenic global warming deniers, and whomever else pretends to use science to actually deny science frequently focus on a trope that “science makes mistakes.” And then they produce a list of historical events that “prove” that science is wrong. Of course, this indicates more of a misunderstanding of what is science and the history of science than it is a condemnation of science. But your typical science denier is probably not going to let facts get in the way of maintaining faith in their beliefs. So let’s deconstruct and discredit these “science makes mistakes” tropes.

By the way, in my story, I admit that “science makes mistakes,” so read on.

What is science?

This is where the science deniers get it all wrong. They think that science is a mysterious group-think of a bunch of ivory-tower bound academics who propose an idea and then “prove” it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Science is actually a logical method to answer questions about the natural universe. It is a way to describe and to understand everything around us, whether our own health or the stars that shine in the night sky.

Science is a process that attempts to remove bias and provide an answer to the question that can stand up to criticism. It is not magical, but it is hard. Even though the vaccine deniers have proclaimed that “vaccines cause autism”, it is not scientific. That hypothesis needs to be tested in unbiased studies, and the results must be available to public review, and, if necessary, critique. And it takes money, time, hard work, and lots of intellectual prowess to design and analyze the results. And lots of people have actually tested the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism, and they have refuted the hypothesis, clearly showing that vaccines do not cause autism.

But more than that, science rarely uses the term “proven”, because the scientific method is not a system to make a definitive answer on any question–scientists always leave open the possibility of an alternative hypothesis that can be tested. If the alternate hypothesis can be supported through experimentation, then it can replace the original one. Yes, science does find errors, all the time. In fact, one of the goals of the scientific process is precisely what defines scientific skepticism, a term frequently co-opted by science deniers, which is a process of evaluating a claim based on the quality and quantity of evidence supporting that claim. A real scientist (or scientific skeptic) is looking for errors, because it is a part of the process.

There are some parts of science that are as close to factual as you can get. The scientific theory of evolution is a fact. The mountains of evidence that support evolution by natural selection and genetic drift are unassailable. That being said, there is a tiny chance (and by tiny, I mean microscopic) that science got it all wrong. There is a Nobel Prize waiting for someone who can provide an alternative explanation for the common descent of all species over time from the moment the first cell arose in the primordial soup 3.5 billion years ago. But to earn that Nobel Prize, you can’t just say that the theory is wrong, you must show it using the scientific method. And trust me, more real scientists look at the mechanisms for evolution (since evolution is a fact, they’re not denying evolution) for new ideas, since it can provide those scientists with fame and fortune.

Because science is not based on dogma or faith, it is self-challenging and self-critical, uncovering errors is part of the process that makes good science. And science is unbiased. The proper method of science is not to invent a conclusion, then find evidence that supports it. It actually works by gathering all of the evidence, deciding which is high quality and which is junk, then determining where that evidence leads. If I were a paleontologist, and I found a fossilized cell phone in Precambrian rock (about 500 million years old), I’d be wondering about a lot of things. But it wouldn’t eliminate evolution as a fact, I might hypothesize that someone had figured out time travel (which is a problem for physicists, let them deal with it).

So, let’s review. Science isn’t a mysterious groups of wizards. Science isn’t definitive, though in a lot of areas of knowledge, it is about 99.999999999999% definitive (which does not round down to 0%). Science is not dogmatic. Science does not accept false dichotomies, that it’s either black or white. And as opposed to science deniers, who think that they have the one truth, real science makes mistakes and uncovers it rather rapidly.

What’s this scientific method that you keep going on about?

The scientific method is an unbiased systematic approach to answer questions about the natural world, including medicine. It has several basic steps:

Define the question–this could be anything from “does this compound have an effect on this disease?” or “how does this disease progress?”

Observations–this is the subjective part of science. Do we observe trends or anomalies? Does a physician notice that every patient from a town or neighborhood exhibit the same disease? A lot of science arises from observations of the natural world, and yes, some of those observations can be anecdotes or personal observations. For example, one of the most famous stories in the early history of medicine is when Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids rarely were infected by smallpox because they were exposed to cowpox, a less virulent disease. Even though anecdotes can be a part of the scientific method, they are not data, and they are rarely used to develop an answer to a question, especially in medicine.

Hypothesis–using the observations, create a hypothesis that can be tested. In Jenner’s case, he hypothesized that those exposed to cowpox would eventually be immune to smallpox.

Experiment–simply, the scientist then tests the hypothesis with experiments and collects the data. The experiments are not designed to solely validate the hypothesis but may also attempt to refute it. In real science, attempting to nullify one’s own hypothesis is an honorable pursuit. Furthermore, the experiments are designed to remove as many biases as possible. For example, the randomized controlled study is considered the gold standard of medical study, because it removes almost all bias from both the subject of the study (the patient) and the physician.*

Analyze–examining the results carefully, usually using acceptable statistical methods.

Interpret–sometimes the data leads to a revision of the hypothesis, which means the scientist has to return to steps 3-6. Or it confirms or supports the hypothesis, which means the researcher can move to Step 7.

Publish–in today’s scientific community, scientific data and analysis is subject to the scrutiny of other scientists before it can be published, a process called “peer-review.” This is a critical step that ensures that the results can stand up to criticism of others.

Retesting–Many times the research is repeated by others, or the hypothesis may be slightly revised with additional data. Science is not static, it constantly revises theories as more data is gathered. For this reason alone, science is not an absolute, it is constantly seeking new data.

Science is an evidence-based systematic analysis without inherent opinion or emotion. In other words, it is a method to cut through opinions and anecdotal observations, so that one can have some reasonable expectation that a medicine or device will work as planned, or if a theory can be predictive.

And as we said, even though the system works very well, mistakes happen.

Piltdown Man proves that scientists commit fraud!

Wow, someone is still using that old story to “prove” that science makes mistakes. Let’s set aside the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence supporting evolution has not been shown to be fraudulent, the creationists use it as their evidence that all evolution is a lie.

Except for one small thing. The story isn’t quite what the evolution deniers claim it is. For those of you who don’t know, Piltdown Man was a hoax perpetrated by an English amateur archeologist, who had combined a modern human skull with a jaw of an orangutan. It was announced in 1912, and was used as “proof” (there’s that nonscientific word) that man descended from apes. Right from the beginning, a lot of experts (by that, I mean professional scientists who studied archeology and human evolution) disputed everything about the so-called fossil, but back then, we didn’t have the scientific techniques, like radiocarbon dating, that might have quickly debunked the hoax. By 1954, using mostly modern scientific techniques, it was shown to be a deception. In other words, a non-scientist perpetrated a scam. And real science uncovered it. Moreover, if someone tried a hoax like that today, it would last all of 10 seconds.

Now, if Piltdown Man was the only piece of evidence of human evolution, the creationists would have a point. Except, it isn’t. The amount of evidence for many of the steps of human evolution since the split from other great apes around 7 million years ago is enormously broad and definitive. There are literally thousands of books that accurately describe human evolution. Here’s my personal favorite: Human Origins: What Bones and Genomes Tell Us about Ourselves.

Unless you believe that one hoax is indicative of a culture of fraud and deceit in evolutionary biology, which is probably a belief of all evolution deniers, then this story is what it is–an isolated attempt for fame and fortune that was shot down rather quickly (with intervening wars, economic depressions, and the lack of technology) by real science.

Yes but scientists thought that smoking was healthy!

Here’s another one of those tropes used by the antivaccination crowd mostly. They use it to discredit “science,” attempting to imply that if these so-called scientists thought that tobacco was healthy, then how can we trust them to say the same thing about vaccines. Or GMO’s. Or cancer treatments. Or climate change. Apparently, this myth is shared at the aforementioned meeting of pseudoscience meeting among all of the participants.

But really, did any real scientist claim that smoking was healthy? Smoking tobacco was prevalent through the native American tribes well before the advent of modern science. There was no Native American CDC or Board of Physicians to approve the use of tobacco as “safe and effective.” In fact, those Native Americans and Europeans who picked up the habit believed in all kinds of nonsense about tobacco, including that it cured cancer. This wasn’t “science” pushing these beliefs, but it was the traditions of the world at the time that put inordinate faith in various herbs and how they could cure various maladies. In fact, thinking smoking or tobacco was healthy was advertised by the woo-pushers of the time (who are barely different than the woo-pushers of the modern world).**

By the late 1800’s, when real evidence-based medicine was in its infancy, many British journals were publishing articles warning about some of the negative health effects of smoking. An article in The Lancet in 1913 warns “that tobacco smoking can give rise to constitutional effects which diminish the resisting power of the body to disease”.

By the 1930’s, real science observed the increase in lung cancer from smoking. The Nazis banned cigarette smoking in the 1930’s because of the known health effects (and that will be the last time I will mention Nazis in any positive sense in anything I ever write again). In 1950, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article by Martin Levin that linked smoking and lung cancer. By the mid-1950’s, numerous epidemiological studies showed a profound increase in lung cancer risk for smokers. The Royal College of Physicians (UK) warned against smoking in 1962. The Surgeon General of the USA warned against smoking in 1964. The CDC has warned against smoking for over 50 years.

Yes, tobacco advertisers used to make ads that showed doctors smoking, or worse, endorsing cigarettes. But that wasn’t the “science” of the time. Big Tobacco (a truly evil lot of characters) said just about anything to get people to smoke, whether it was showing doctors smoking or that smoking made you sexy. But they weren’t using peer-reviewed science, these ads were worse than anecdotes, because they were outright lies and mischaracterizations. Science had already concluded that cigarettes were unhealthy a half century before those ads.

Once real epidemiological studies were published in peer-reviewed journals, the attitude about smoking changed almost immediately in the medical and general scientific community. And that’s how real science works–it self-corrects.

So if you think that “scientists pushed tobacco,” nothing could be further from the truth, unless you want to accept the advertising from Big Tobacco as some sort of truth. And it was real science that found the link (when modern epidemiology really developed as a discipline), and it was real science that became the basis of the worldwide effort against smoking.

As a suggestion to the science deniers–quit using this trope. It shows how ignorant you are of history, the scientific method, and reality.

Ok, how about DDT?!?!

What about DDT? For a little background, DDT is a powerful insecticide, invented by Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” OK, I’m going to concede that a real scientist invented DDT.

But, there is much more to the story. The chemical was used extensively during World War II by the Allies, in both the Pacific and Europe, to control the insect vectors of typhus, dengue fever and malaria, nearly eliminating it in Europe. DDT was spectacularly successful in eliminating these diseases in Australia, the South Pacific, South America and other areas of the world after WWII. At the time, the goal of defeating those diseases far exceeded any risk known at that time.

However, if you think those mythical science wizards were standing in their Dark Tower waving their wands of power suppressing all other knowledge of DDT, you would be wrong. Early data about the harmful effects of DDT was known by scientists (I guess not the ones standing in the tower), and by 1950, the US Department of Agriculture, which had jurisdiction over insecticide use at the time, were beginning to establish regulations to limit DDT’s use. By the early 1960’s, upon publication of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, which described some scientific, but mostly anecdotal evidence that DDT had harmful and long-lasting effects on the environment, the tide turned against DDT and it was mostly banned or strictly controlled by the late 1960’s.

Today, DDT is still used because it is still an effective means of controlling certain insect vectors, especially in areas where governments cannot afford more expensive insecticides or the latest medical treatments, especially for malaria. It is through the scientific method that real scientists determined the potential environmental dangers of DDT, but also on how to use it safely where alternatives are costly.

No matter what we think of DDT now, it was responsible for saving millions of lives. Science isn’t black and white, it’s politicians and pseudoscience believers who think that way. In a balanced and nuanced discussion about DDT, there are two sides of the story: one side is saving lives, and on the other, an environmental disaster. But science has discovered ways where we might get both environmental safety and protecting humans. But more than that, real science is looking for a better solution, whether it’s safer insecticides or vaccines to protect individuals against malaria and dengue fever.

It’s kind of ironic that cancer therapies, which often are declared successful if they increase lifespan by a few months even when they can be toxic with some awful side-effects. It’s a simple cost-benefit calculation for cancer sufferers, in that they get maybe 6 months of life and hope, even if the quality of life is affected by the medication. Although some may argue any damage to the environment is unacceptable, is there not a similar cost-benefit calculation to save lives from malaria, dengue fever or other insect vector diseases?

So, sure, science gave us DDT, but it saved millions of lives, before science discovered that it’s dangerous.

Then science isn’t perfect!!!

Sorry no it isn’t, and no scientist would make that claim. It’s a method to find evidence, but until such time it is done by unfeeling robots, it is a human activity, wracked with errors of human intellect, bias, and random mistakes. But because science has become more open to criticism and analysis, it has actually become better. You just can’t get away with a claim that “smoking is healthy” today, because there would be a hundred scientists jumping on it, and showing other facts. We have high quality open source journals that publish information quickly (still heavily peer-reviewed), so that claims that don’t make scientific sense get squashed quickly.

The three examples used here, Piltdown man, smoking and DDT, are really ancient news, given how fast science moves today. And then we forget about all the great successes of science. Vaccines that have nearly eliminated most infectious diseases (sorry vaccine deniers, but you just have no scientific standing to say anything else; even evolution deniers accept vaccines). We have computers and phones that allow you to read my article 5 seconds after I publish it. We’ve explored Mars and landed on the moon. We understand the beginnings of the universe. I’m incapable of reading maps, but thanks to GPS systems I never get lost, thank you science. I can’t even list the billions of things that make your life better, just because of science.

So cherry picking a few errors of science (if I were an anti-science person, I would have focused on some real winners, like thalidomide, canals on Mars, or using an ultra-high speed drill to open calcified atherosclerotic lesions) just to confirm your cognitive biases about science, does not provide support for your pseudoscience belief. It just makes you look foolish. Moreover, for every “mistake” you can find about science, I can easily show you that it was real science that uncovered that mistake.

That said, other ways of viewing of our world clearly carry greater weight for people than science or evidence does. If evidence and data were the only factors in human decision-making, the epic debates humans engage in about whether vaccines eradicated smallpox or whether global climate change is real wouldn’t exist. Even though science is the ultimate lens for truly understanding what underlies our entire existence, we obviously use other, frequently more myopic lenses available to us.

And that leads me to the faults of science. Humans do science, and because we bring our own personalized lenses and biases to whatever we do, science will involve error. But the wonderful thing about science is that it’s a self-correcting process that over time, disciplines itself. How did we discover the real effects of tobacco or DDT that ultimately were revealed? Science made those revelations, and science provided the data everyone needed to know the truth.

Only in an imaginary world would anyone think that science is perfect. But in this real world, science makes our lives better in innumerable ways. My life has been devoted to science, and I have made more mistakes doing it than you can ever believe, but in the end, what I have done in the pursuit of scientific knowledge has helped my fellow man in direct, quantifiable ways. I think that’s what science does best, it helps mankind, both directly and indirectly. And finding a few errors along the way? That’s just part of the process. And all of you should be thankful that the process self corrects, or you wouldn’t have that computer that allows you to read my words. Or detect cancer. Or guide a spacecraft 100 million km (give or take a couple of km) from the Earth to Mars.

**This kind of puts a bit of perspective on “traditional herbal remedies” because much of the evidence for their usefulness is based on oral tradition which is a recounting of anecdotes rather than clinical trials.

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Lifetime lover of science, especially biomedical research. Spent years in academics, business development, research, and traveling the world shilling for Big Pharma. I love sports, mostly college basketball and football, hockey, and baseball. I enjoy great food and intelligent conversation. And a delicious morning coffee!

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